Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 440, Tipping the Balance.

Recently, one of my supporters on Patreon asked me a question that's been on my mind for a bit.

They asked something to the effect of, why is it that there's this theme in Japanese history

of maintaining the fiction of an old political order, even while establishing a new one.

Why, for example, would hundreds of years of samurai governments, possessed as they were of,

if not a monopoly on force, at least a pretty strong hold on the field, feel compelled to keep

around a bunch of fuddy old aristocrats and an emperor to trot out for ceremonial occasions? And why would said aristocrats and fuddy old aristocrats and an emperor to trot out for ceremonial occasions.

And why would said aristocrats and fuddy old emperor go along with such an arrangement?

It's a good question, and one that comes up a lot when you start exploring Japanese history.

On the samurai side of things, I think the answer is comparatively straightforward.

The legitimacy provided by aristocratic institutions relative to their threat level made the decision to keep them around fairly easy.

One could draw an analogy to the early centuries of the Roman Empire, when the institutions of the Republic were maintained on a superficial level to lend legitimacy to the rule of the emperors.

After all, as the old saying goes, you can kill some of the people some of the time, but you can't

kill all of the people all of the time, because if you do, what's left to rule over.

So anything that enables you to govern that gives you legitimacy

beyond just pure force of arms is potentially very useful. But what about on the side of the

aristocracy? Why would they accept subordination? The answer, simply put, is that many of them did not,

and it was only once those aristocrats were either cowed or dead,

that the remainder began to accommodate themselves to the new order of things.

The most famous example of aristocratic resistance to the new warrior-dominated order is the so-called

Kenmu Restoration, when the Emperor Go Daigo led an uprising in the 1330s to attempt to restore

power to the imperial court, only to be thwarted when one of his warrior allies, Ashkaga Takauuchi,

...